Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Hollywood loves Massacre movies. Put the word massacre in IMDB's title search and you'll see

Allied
Artists grew out of the Poverty Row studio Monogram. Monogram producer Walter
Mirisch had great ambitions and wanted “B-plus” pictures, even, gasp, in color.
At
a time when the average Hollywood picture cost about $800,000 and the average
Monogram picture cost about $90,000, AA's first release, It Happened on
Fifth Avenue (1947), cost more than $1.2m. Despite the budgets and color,
though, AA pictures in the 40s and 50s still looked like, well, big Bs.

Dragoon Wells Massacre was a typical example of a 1950s AA Western. At
88 minutes, in color with Kanab, Utah locations photographed by William
Clothier and with a strong cast, this was no poverty row programmer. It was
directed by Harold D Schuster, former silent movie actor (he’d been in The Iron Horse; but then, who hadn’t?)
and became an editor and then a director. He did the rather touching My Friend Flicka (the 1943 film version)
and in 1953 he made Jack Slade, a B
which punches above its weight and has some quality. The direction of Dragoon Wells Massacre is tight and
controlled, though it is hard to keep up the rhythm in movies about people
walking through a desert.

Worth a look

The writing
has quality too, even if the premise of Judge Isaac C Parker’s prison wagon,
known as the Tumbleweed, trawling through Arizona for prisoners is a bit
far-fetched. But there are some good lines, and characters are developed; they
are not just cardboard cut-outs of people. The screenplay was by Warren
Douglas, who had written Cry Vengeance
and would later do The Night of the Grizzly, from a story by Oliver Drake, who wrote Three Mesquiteers stories.

As for the
cast, well, Barry Sullivan got top billing and while I must admit never to have
been an ardent Sullivan fan (as far as Westerns are concerned) I must say he is
very good in this, carrying off the ‘charming rogue’ role of Link Ferris well.
On TV he reduced Pat Garrett, I thought, to a character in a soap in The Tall Man, and the story of the Prides
in The Road West never really gripped
me either. And on the big screen he was pretty poor in Forty Guns (but then the movie was junk). Still, he’s worth
watching Dragoon Wells for.

He never really made it in Westerns but is good in this one

The
straight man to his likeable scoundrel is Dennis O’Keefe, who plays an upright
and commanding cavalry captain, Matt Riordan. O’Keefe, friend of Clark Gable,
was a low-budget action movie go-to and a natural for B-Westerns. He’d started
as an extra on Cimarron in 1931 and The Plainsman in 1936, and his first
starring role in the saddle was in MGM’s comedy-romance The Kid from Texas in 1939. But he didn’t do a great number of
oaters, being cast more in rom-coms. He’s OK in Dragoon Wells and gets into the part fine. He is sole survivor of
the first massacre and takes charge of the strange mixture of odd-bods that
turns up afterwards.

The two
men, crooked gambler and stalwart captain, are in a way linked by the same dame, Ann Bradley (Mona Freeman, six Westerns, Alan Ladd's love interest in Branded), passenger on the stage
with her fiancé Phillip Scott (Max Showalter, as Casey Adams). This is a
mystery because the Bradley woman is perfectly detestable. Scott realizes this
eventually and dumps her. Riordan is her ex and can’t stand her, rightly. Link
at first taunts her and she hates him but eventually they hit it off, which, as
the French say, is peu credible. The
poor man is saddled with her at the end of the film as he tries to ride off to
California and the wretched woman pursues him. This happened to Mr. Sullivan a
lot because the same year, just when he thought he’d shot Barbara Stanwyck in Forty Guns, she ran after his buckboard
and he was stuck with the harridan for life.

Improbable romance

The
story hinges on three conveyances converging on the site of a massacre of
soldiers by Apaches. The aforementioned Tumbleweed, containing Link and
fellow-crook Jack Elam (in a very sympathetic performance); then the
stagecoach with Hank Worden as Hopi Charlie, the driver, and Freeman and O’Keefe as passengers –
also aboard is the gorgeous and wonderful Katy Jurado, by far the most
sympathetic character of the movie; and a low-life Indian trader’s wagon
conducted by the lone, and very fat and always entertaining Sebastian Cabot. You certainly didn’t get
many of Mr. Cabot to the pound and he played in TV Westerns, usually as the
baddy, quite a bit. He only did three Western movies, more’s the pity, this
one, Westward Ho, The Wagons! And the
excellent little Sterling Hayden noir B-movie Terror in a Texas Town, in which he was the smiling saloon-owner
villain. In Dragoon Wells, it turns
out that Mr. Cabot has been selling both whiskey and guns to the Apaches and that makes him a very bad boy indeed.

Disreputable Indian trader Sebastian Cabot

The
three small parties have to decide what to do and they opt (well, Riordan
bossily opts for them) for making for a fifteen-mile-distant relay station all
in the wagon. The story now becomes one of those ones in which the group
stagger forward through the arid and inhospitable terrain harried by thirst and
the hostile Indians, and are picked off one by one. In fact the film really
ought to have been called The Dragoon
Wells Massacres because there is a series of the said mass murders. When
they get to the relay station it has been burnt and the inhabitants, yes, massacred.
They pick up the sole survivor, a little girl. Then they get to the fort at
Dragoon Wells and guess what. Yup, the garrison has been massacred. They sure
did a lot of massacring in Arizona in them days.

On the left, wonderful Katy Jurado, less than wonderful Mona Freeman and her rather ineffectual fiancé Casey Adams

Yellow
Cloud (John War Eagle) gets the blame. This is perhaps the Yellow Cloud that Iron Eyes Cody
played in Son of Paleface but I don’t
think so really. The Apaches are, as was normal in B-Westerns, homicidal and
indistinguishable savages. Though in the 1950s, from Broken Arrow on, they were starting to be presented as real people and
with a certain amount of right on their side, AA hadn’t quite caught up with
this trend. Of course Geronimo gets a mention. The G-word would always excite
fear and trembling among lone whites. Mr. Cloud is apparently Geronimo’s
henchman.

John War Eagle as two-dimensional Indian chief Yellow Cloud. Dig the make-up.

Well,
Indians, thirst and bad guys in the party gradually whittle away at the numbers
and the original eleven shrink to six, or six and a half if you count the
child. Relationships develop and wither. Tension does its work. There’s a regrettable
fight between Mona and Katy, which should have been cut (though it would have
been OK if Katy had taken Mona out). Rather as in Stagecoach, I guess, it’s society’s outcasts who are the most
likeable characters, Katy’s disreputable Mexican woman, Link the gambler, Jack
Elam the ugly killer, while the ‘respectable’ folk like Mona the lady are shown
as weak, helpless and essentially worthless.

On one level
just another B-Western, Dragoon Wells
Massacre has enough interest and quality to merit a three-revolver rating
and, if it comes on TV for example, it would repay a watch.

Sunday, April 26, 2015

The TV
schedules announced Rustlers as the
1919 short and I was delighted, not having seen it – I didn’t even know it
survived. That movie is an early Hoot Gibson, the 29th of his 192 Westerns, and
it was directed by John Ford. Sadly, however, the writers of the blurb in the TV
guide had got it wrong and it was the 1949 Rustlers
that they were showing, which is a black & white Tim Holt programmer. Sigh.

Still, I
watched it. Well, you gotta. And it was worth it. Not because it was any
different from all the other Tim Holt Westerns. Tim was there with sidekick
Chito Rafferty (Richard Martin) foiling skullduggery and smiling winsomely, as always. But
because a derringer plays a central part in it.

One of the long series of oaters Tim Holt did for RKO

Now
regular readers of this blog, both of them, will know that I am besotted with what
one reader told me was always called in her family “a villain gun”. I am
something of a derringer aficionado, if truth be told, and any movie that contains
one will go up in my estimation. Rustlers
contains an especially good one.

In a 1953
episode of The Range Rider called Outlaw Pistols, the bad guy Laredo
(George L Lewis) fools young Dick West, “all-American boy” (Dickie Jones), by
crafting a derringer out of soap. He uses it to threaten the sheriff’s daughter
and make Dick let him out of jail. See, not only a sneaky hideout gun for a
bandit used against a sweet girl but it’s not even real! Boy, is that tricky.
Well, perhaps the makers of that deathless TV show had seen Rustlers because a derringer is also
used in a jail break there. This time, saloon gal Trixie Fontaine (Lois
Andrews) bakes a cake with a derringer at its center and the dumb sheriff doesn’t
even check it, though he makes a play for the cake, wishing to deny the chocolate
sumptuousness to the prisoners Tim and Chito, and swallow it himself. Anyway,
that was a thrill.

Rustlers was directed by Lesley Selander, like many of
the Tim Holt series, and Mr. Selander knew a thing or two about making B-Westerns.
He ought to: he was involved in 184 of them, from 1925 to 1968.

Martha is convinced that Chito is a rustler

The
movie is slightly unusual because normally Tim shows no interest in the girls
at all, leaving that to Chito, but this time he gets Ruth (Martha Hyer) at the
end – very chastely, of course. No kiss or anything like that. Trixie is left
to Chito, though as she wants to marry him, he runs a mile, as always.

This
time Tim Holt is Dick McBride. Usually he was Tim Holt. His horse Lightning
also plays a key role in the skullduggery-thwarting.

Well, it
wasn’t Hoot Gibson and John Ford, but it made for a pleasant 61 minutes.

Friday, April 24, 2015

Comedy
Westerns can be unfunny parodies (and to the serious Westernista, faintly
sacrilegious) or affectionate, smiling tributes. You can probably think of
examples of both. In the latter category I would place the Buster Keaton Go West, the 1939 Destry, the Bob Hope Paleface pictures, The Sheepman and, of course, Blazing Saddles. Among others. I love these films and will watch them any time they
come on. Cat Ballou just about makes
it into the list of affectionate tributes. It’s not a mocking effort and it
laughs with rather than at the genre. It’s not the most hilarious film, though,
and for me anyway doesn’t come in the must-watch department when it appears in
the TV schedules. Still, it has quite a lot going for it.

Derringers
for one thing. You know how I like the villainous little guns. Usually they
appear in the hands of saloon gals, gamblers or besuited crooks. But in Cat Ballou semi-goody Jed (Dwayne
Hickman), dressed as a priest to rescue his pardner from the clutches of
Sheriff Bruce Cabot, conceals a derringer in a bible. In a bible! Boy, is that sneaky. Dean Martin copied that idea in 5 Card Stud three years later. So that
was a great bit in Cat Ballou. Better
still, Cat Ballou is a two-derringer
movie (a rare bird indeed) because later on Cat shoots Sir Harry (Reginald
Denny) with one (no more than he deserved), and that’s what leads her to the
gallows in Wolf City, WY in 1894.

A two-derringer Western

That’s
where the story is set, and it’s the time of the Hole in the Wall Gang, though
their glory hath departed and Butch Cassidy is played by Arthur Hunnicutt, 55
but doing his old-timer routine. Actually, Butch (Robert Leroy Parker) didn’t
start his depredations or recruit the Sundance Kid until 1896, when he was 30,
but we won’t worry about that too much.

Paul Newman seems to have aged a bit

In fact
the cast of Cat Ballou is pretty
good. It is true that the good-badmen heroes, Michael Callan as Clay and Dwayne
Hickman as Jed, were not top-line Western stars, though Mr. Callan was in They Came to Corduraand The Magnificent Seven Ride! and Mr.
Hickman was in several TV Westerns, but other members of the cast were a
delight to watch. Jane Fonda is a rather charming Cat. Arthur as Butch Cassidy
has to be worth seeing and there’s Jay C Flippen as the corrupt sheriff
complementing the great Bruce Cabot as lawman. Nat King Cole and Stubby Kaye
provide an entertaining Greek chorus with banjos (which they strum very
unconvincingly to the soundtrack, sometimes not even bothering). Above all we
have Lee Marvin as both the drunken gunslinger Kid Shelleen and the evil
noseless assassin Tim Strawn.

Lawman Cabot

Lawman Flippen

Marvin was
in 20 Western movies (if you regard The Missouri Traveler, Pocket Money, Raintree County and Bad Day at Black Rock as Westerns) and one or two of his
appearances were perhaps less than epic but his Liberty Valance, his Monte Walsh, his Masters in Seven Men From Now and his part as the leader Fardan in The Professionals make him a leading Western star. He had the right
level of grit and toughness and he always lifted even an indifferent movie.
Four years after Cat Ballou he
starred in another famous box-office hit comedy Western, Paint Your Wagon. Luckily, in Cat
Ballou he does not break into song. He certainly hams it up as the drunk
Shelleen but he is splendidly menacing as Strawn. And the part where he cleans
up, and his squire, the Sioux Jackson Two Bears (Tom Nardini), dresses him in
his gunslinger armor like some medieval knight, is memorable. The idea of the broken-down
gunfighter getting back into shape is of course a familiar trope, and the
getting the old guns and clothes out of a drawer or trunk is instantly
recognizable to us. Marvin won an Oscar for his part(s).

Marvin fine

Yakima
Canutt was the 2nd Unit director too, so the stunts are good.

The
movie was directed by Elliott Silverstein, not perhaps in the front rank of
Western directors but he had done some TV shows and in 1970 he was to direct A Man Called Horse. The story came from
a Roy Chanslor novel (as did Johnny Guitar)
and was written up into a screenplay by Walter Newman, who worked with Nunnally
Johnson on The True Story of Jesse James
and also contributed (uncredited) to The Magnificent Seven, and the hugely experienced Frank Pierson, who did loads of Have Gun – Will Travel episodes. Some of
the lines are amusing and the story nips right along so no complaints there.

Jane charming as Cat

The DP
was Jack Marta (Dark Command) and
there are some nice locations with Buckskin Joe, Colorado standing in for
Wyoming.

Monday, April 20, 2015

The late
1940s were a golden age for John Wayne. The endless Poverty Row B-movie programmers of the
30s were a thing of the past and he now starred in some big pictures for
Republic, RKO and even, in the case of 3 Godfathers, MGM. The pleasant Angel and the Badman of 1947 was followed by mighty examples of the genre, notably
the Howard Hawks-directed Red River,
which screened in 1948, and, from 1948 to 50, the great cavalry trilogy of John Ford, Fort Apache,She Wore a Yellow Ribbon and Rio Grande. Still, Duke found time to
produce his own film for Republic (the titles proudly say A JOHN WAYNE
PRODUCTION) which appeared between Fort
Apache and Yellow Ribbon, The Fighting Kentuckian.

Hardly a Western at all, but entertaining

Now The Fighting Kentuckian is only barely a
Western at all, as The New York Times
commented, being more of an historical romance. Set in 1819, it has backwoodsmen
with single-shot muskets and coonskin caps, and gentlemen with top hats and
cutaway coats. Still, if you are not a purist in your definitions you will let
this movie pass as a Western because it has Western themes and tropes, and
well, it smacks of one.

It is no
Red River or Fort Apache, let’s be clear on that at the outset. It’s a pleasant
enough excursion into Alabama, rather slow to begin with but picking up the
pace to quite an exciting climax, with some weak acting, notably from Vera
Ralston as the heroine and good old Hank Worden (hardly at the top of his game:
he dutifully announces the lines he has learned - luckily it’s a small part)
but also with some quite good playing, especially from Wayne and, as his obese
sidekick, Oliver Hardy, sans Laurel.

Oliver Hardy is the comic sidekick

It was
directed by George Waggner, the 77 Sunset
Strip fellow (how I loved that series as a boy). But Waggers had been involved
in Westerns (as actor, writer or director) since the Stone Age – well, 1922. The Fighting Kentuckian was probably his
biggest Western, maybe his biggest film, though he also directed Randolph Scott
in Gunfighters in 1947. He could
handle action, and while the screenplay saddled him with sluggish plot
development in the first reel and too little action (that was his own fault as he wrote it), once the pace picked up he
showed he knew how to do it alright.

George Waggner

Despite the
unusual historical context, the plot is in fact standard Western fare. Congress
has granted some Napoleonic exiles land in Alabama, and they have founded
Demopolis. This means that the actors speak English wiz a Franche accent, at
which Ms. Ralston is not too good, but never mind. Actually, Hugo Haas as the
French general (and father of the girl) and Philip Dom as his right hand man Colonel
Geraud (well, he would have been a right hand man had he not lost his arm in ze
war) are rather good, and they manage quite a moving portrayal of defeated
soldiers trying to hold on to their pride and start a new life in a weird world
populated by the likes of John Wayne and Ollie Hardy in buckskins. So far, so
quite unusual.

Duke doing his Davy Crockett/Dan'l Boone act

But in
fact it turns out that a slimy boss of the town (in a mustache, natch) wants
the land which Congress has granted the exiles for himself, and he and his
henchmen (one of whom is Wayne’s pal, the excellent Paul Fix) are prepared to
stoop to unscrupulosity to get it. The hero will thwart their evil schemes.

OK, I
know unscrupulosity isn’t a word but I like it, so it is one now.

Paul Fix henching away

This
plot has of course adorned almost every Western there ever was.

Although
there are no sparks at all between Wayne and Ralston (in fact he appears more
attracted to the naughty saloon gal Marie Windsor), there is an evident
chemistry between Duke and Ollie. Mr. Hardy even manages to mount a horse at
one point, though he is usually seated on a log and blowing on a bugle, or waddling
about in that hammy way he had. Still, though, he shows an unexpected talent
for the thespian arts, even if his role is hardly Shakespearean, or if it is,
it is more in the Macbeth porter class than Falstaff. Vera Ralston appears to
have been warned against woodenness and overcompensates by overacting. She was
actually in eleven Westerns, amazingly, but the fact that her husband was the
studio boss may have had something to do with that.

Vera Ralston

There’s
a good high-speed wagon chase and an actionful climax, with the brave
Kentuckians (they are Andy Jackson veterans) coming to the rescue of the brave
Frenchies and beating the dastardly land-grabbers. Wayne marries Vera and they
go off on their honeymoon. Duke asks rather hopefully if Ollie can come along
but is given a firm no.

Of
course purists don’t consider these stories Westerns at all, being set in
Mexico as they are and in the twentieth century. But for me they are Westerns
alright, no doubt about it.

Well,
Rory Calhoun was the gringo in old Mehico in 1955. And a mid-50s RKO color
Western with Rory, directed by good old George Sherman and with Gilbert Roland
and Joseph Calleia in the cast, hell, what’s not to like?

I don't know about history... Hollywood history
maybe.

It’s
1915 (as is right and proper for these tales) and two adventurers out for gold,
one a Mexican colonel (Gilbert, of course) and one a Yankee gringo (Rory,
naturally), are after gold bullion destined for Pancho Villa to fund his revoluciόn. Yup,
they want it for themselves. All these pictures have a gringo gun-runner or whatever and a charismatic Mexican rebel; it was de rigueur. Gilbert is dashing as ever and you can tell he is
Mexican because he whistles La Cucaracha.
Rory is the tough mercenary Tom Bryan but of course he is secretly a goody,
deep down.

I was
never a Rory Calhoun fan as a Western-obsessed boy in the 50s but in my dotage I have come round
to thinking he was pretty damn good in the saddle. He’d started by co-starring
with Guy Madison in Massacre River in 1949 and got his first Western lead (if Western it was) in the
Jacques Tourneur-directed Way of a Gaucho
in 1954. The following year he famously starred with Robert Mitchum and Marilyn
Monroe in River of No Return. Pancho Villa was
his thirteenth big-screen Western and I think he’s rather good in it.

Rory has firepower

There
has to be love interest, of course, and Shelley Winters is the
pro-revolutionary daughter of a mine owner. She kinda fancies Rory but is put
off by his lack of crusading zeal. Ms. Winters was never, I thought, that good
in Westerns. It would be ungallant of me to suggest that she had a weight
problem and indeed, in this one, her girth is still relatively modest. It
wasn’t that. She just never seemed right, somehow. She was better as a
gangster’s moll or something. She had started her prairie career in a very
small part as an uncredited dance hall girl in Red River in 1948 but came to fame, as far as oaters are concerned, as the luscious
Lola for James Stewart to woo in Winchester
’73 in 1950 (though he seemed more interested in the rifle). She was the eponymous Frenchie in
Universal’s Destry
remake the same year, then starred with Joseph Cotten (they were both unsuited
to the genre) in Untamed
Frontier in ’52 and she romanced Mountie Alan Ladd in the Raoul Walsh-directed
Saskatchewan
in ’54. Pancho Villa was her sixth, and
last oater until a late ‘comedy’ Western, The Scalphunters in
1968 with Burt Lancaster and Telly Savalas. To be brutally frank, it was a less
than glorious Western career.

Shelley not quite right in Westerns

You have
to love Gilbert Roland (Luis Antonio Damaso de Alonso), born in Mexico in 1905.
He combined Latin-lover flair and Western swagger (and a caddish mustache) with
- there’s only one word for it - aplomb. He was a natural for Westerns, even
before The Cisco
Kid, especially if a Mexican were needed, and he had starred in them since Men of the North
in 1930. He was a Mex Colonel to a Hollywood gringo again in Bandido!
the year after Pancho
Villa, so the formula obviously worked. In ’56 the gringo was of course Bob
Mitchum, as per usual. Anyway, I always like Gilbert. I mean just look at this
photo. Is that cool or what?

Dashing Gilbert Roland

Joseph
Calleia was another of Hollywood’s tame Mexicans. I think he was never less
than excellent. I first came across him in the delightful 1948 Joel McCrea
outing Four
Faces West (an outstanding Western) but he was in a lot. He had
actually started on the writing team of the 1936 Joaquin Murrieta tale Robin Hood of El
Dorado and he had first appeared as an actor in an oater in The Bad Man of
Brimstone in 1937. Wallace Beery was the badman in question, and Calleia
appeared with Beery again in Wyoming in 1940.
That year too he was the best thing about the WC Fields/Mae West romp My
Little Chickadee where he played Jeff Baxter, the saloon owner and town
boss, who is also the Zorroesque “Masked Bandit”. He had parts in two Alan Ladd
Westerns, Branded
and The Iron
Mistress, and Pancho Villa,
where he is Pablo Morales and, it turns out, rather a stinker, was his ninth
horse opera. Watch out for him; he always lifted a movie.

So much
for the cast. As to the direction, well, George Sherman (1908 – 1991) was a
more than reliable helmsman of oaters. He did a lot of those Three Mesquiteers
pictures in the 1930s and John Wayne remembered him on big later Batjac Westerns,
though by then Sherman was really only director in name, Duke himself having to
do most of the work on Big
Jake. But pint-sized Sherman (he barely reached five foot) was involved
in 158 Westerns altogether, from 1935 to 1971, nearly all Bs. He was a real
pro, and knew exactly what was needed and how to do it.

Given all these top-notch hired pens, the screenplay of Pancho Villa was
in fact surprisingly clunky and pedestrian. But never mind.

Rory and Gilbert, after the gold. Dig the boots.

Morelos
locations were used and the DP was William E Snyder of The Man from Colorado
and The
Americanofame so the picture is visually attractive.

Rory has
a machine gun. It’s first seen in a ‘cello case, and perhaps that’s where
spaghettis got their obsession with machine guns in music cases (and later,
coffins). The pursuing Federales have
Yaqui scouts and trackers. Rory’s costume makes no allowances for 1915 Mexico
but is his classic rig from dozens of oaters set in the 1870s.

Wednesday, April 15, 2015

Columbia’s
late-60s The Desperados, not to be
confused with their 1943 Randolph Scott/Claire Trevor oater The Desperadoes, is pretty trashy. Where
the 1940s picture was energetic and fun, the 60s one is a spaghetti-influenced nonentity.
In 1943 there was a Max Brand story, directing by Charles Vidor and supporting
the principals in the cast were Glenn Ford, Edgar Buchanan and Guinn ‘Big Boy’
Williams. In the 1969 movie there were only Dr. Ben Casey (Vince Edwards) and
Londoner Sylvia Syms. Neville Brand as the marshal and Jack Palance as the guerrilla leader
couldn’t do anything to save it: they both act badly and they both have
dreadful lines The director was rom-com specialist Henry Levin (though to be
fair Levin did make The Lonely Man
with Palance in ’57). The screenplay was by Walter Brough and it was his only
Western movie; you can see why.

OK if you like crap

It’s the
Civil War or just after. Parson Josiah Galt (Palance) in a Confederate uniform
rides on St. Thomas, in a mountainous Kansas (it’s actually Almeria) and lays
waste to it using his 1870s Colts. Brave son Davy, in stick-on Elvis sideburns,
doesn’t approve of pillaging. He retires to a ranch in Texas, Spain with a wife
(Syms) and son (la Syms’s real son) and tries to lead a decent life. But there’s
a guerrilla raid on his town which makes Northfield look like a church social. Many stuntmen fall
from roofs. Davy’s past has come back to haunt him, you know how it does.

I would call it a sub-spaghetti but how can anything be worse than a spaghetti?

Palance
overacts, as he was wont to do, especially in his later career, and Edwards and
Sims weren’t exactly Oscar contenders either. Palance looks about the same age
as his son. Very overweight Neville Brand says his (clunky) lines dutifully but really… George
Maharis from Route 66 is another Galt
son. There’s a train and an inappropriate helicopter shot. There’s a stupid
echo. At the end the protagonists fall to their death and really, it’s just as
well.

Neville Brand. Not his finest hour.

The print
is poor, and the horses are often blue. There are fades-to-black which speak of
a TV provenance. It was an American-British co-production, which is why
unsuitable Brit actors are in it. I urge you, dear e-readers, to give this one
a miss.